4 Years of Modihttp://www.openthemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/26009/feed
enNarendra Modi: Still the Unchallengedhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/narendra-modi-still-the-unchallenged
<p>NO INDIAN PRIME Minister in recent memory has had on his shoulders the burden of steering both the Government he heads and the political party he spearheads. No Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru or his daughter Indira Gandhi has wielded such charm as a crowd puller and had the stamina to create history across new geographies. Unlike them both, he didn’t have the popularity and reach of a party apparatus moulded and mobilised by the Mahatma to fall back on. Whether one admires or hates him, Narendra Modi has over the past four years nearly perfected the role of a tireless campaigner determined to go the whole hog in politics, regardless of the grime and dust, election after election.</p>
<p>He strode into the national field like a man possessed, like one of those mythical warriors of yore who would invest vast amounts of time and energy in annexing new territory and then consolidate the gains as though no power was enough power when there was yet another fight to be won.</p>
<p>Modi is both revered and reviled for his outspokenness and disrespect for the status quo, but Indian politics since 2014 has been centred on him, especially wherever his party, the BJP, had a stake or needed one. The cause and consequence of his advance has been the decline and fall of the Congress party, which was not only voted out four years ago after 10 years of being in power at the Centre, but has seen the count of states under its rule collapse from 11 to three in the period since. Modi began his Lok Sabha campaign in 2014 exhorting the electorate to vote for a ‘Congress- free India’, and as of now, the rival party’s electability looks unable to recover from its crash in 2014, when it was reduced to its lowest tally in Parliament. In the just-concluded Assembly polls of Karnataka, it has slid from 122 seats five years earlier to 78 now.</p>
<p>Modi had hit the ground running in 2013 once it was clear that he would be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for the General Election the following year. At the time, some leaders in his own party were not fully convinced that he was the right choice. This, despite the fact that the then Chief Minister of Gujarat had more than adequately demonstrated his sway over voters in the western state he had won time and again. As the campaign for 2014 got underway, instead of calling the phenomenon of his rising appeal as a national leader what it was—a wave—opinion writers back then preferred to term it just a ‘force multiplier’ for his party. It was especially evident in Rajasthan: constituencies where Modi campaigned won the BJP greater margins of victory than other seats. The same was true of Madhya Pradesh as well as Chhattisgarh, where the BJP bucked anti-incumbency and created history by not doing well in Bastar and still forming the state government. Still, there was some hesitation in giving him his due credit.</p>
<p>However, over the next few months in the run-up to 2014, the Modi effect was felt by his rivals even in the eastern states of Bihar and elsewhere, with leaders who would otherwise have lobbied hard for tickets refusing to contest the polls in fear of being swamped over by a BJP wave. As they say, the rest was history: for the first time since 1984, a single party had the numbers to form a government at the Centre on its own. Politically, it was a dramatic event in national politics, an obliteration of a long-held myth that coalition politics marked by dependence on regional players was there to stay.</p>
<p>An astute politician blessed with oratorical skills, Modi knew the Lok Sabha triumph was just the beginning. It was time to follow it through with a string of wins in the states as well, displaying his sustained popularity on his way to the next General Election. Expansion was the game. Maharashtra was the first challenge, and in a state where a Congress-led alliance and the provincial Shiv Sena had invariably called the shots, the BJP, for the first time, became a power to reckon with on its own. Other rival strongholds also began to crumble under the weight of a BJP campaign aided by strategy and vision. After that, barring two resounding defeats in Delhi and Bihar, the party has been on a winning spree, amassing significant gains across the country. And now in Karnataka, against provincial forces of linguistic chauvinism, the BJP has emerged as the single-largest party in a fiercely fought election. The overall score card looks impressive: the party is in power in 22 states. The Modi Wave shows no sign of abating and he remains the man in control.</p>
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<p>Over the past four years, Narendra Modi and his team have been subjected to much scrutiny and criticism. But the Prime Minister does not allow himself to be distracted from the job he has been given by the country's electorate</p>
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<p>Even Modi’s opponents secretly concede that one of his biggest assets is his ‘outsider’ tag, which he has managed to retain even four years after moving to Delhi to assume office. As Prime Minister, he is a hard task master who keeps a close watch of almost all that his Government does. This also explains his connect with the marginalised yet aspirational classes of the country. The chord he has struck with the poor sets him apart from other leaders who, while saying similar things, often end up being branded as part of an ‘establishment’ that has largely been discredited. Scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s observations on Modi perhaps sum up that appeal: ‘The fellow is an ascetic and I usually trust people who are ascetic.’</p>
<p>Modi’s life story holds its own fascination for vast numbers. The boy from Vadnagar, the son of a teashop owner who made it to the top, not only is he seen as destiny’s child, but an original. He has defied the rules of political correctness, embracing Hindutva politics so unabashedly that governance with a Hindu theme has become the new normal. He has refused to confine himself to the old political lexicon of Lutyens’ Delhi, overturning all manner of received wisdom from the Nehruvian past. He has finessed a vocabulary of his own, one that plays to saffron sentiment, and made it the language of the country’s highest echelons of power. He has made no bones about having been groomed in the RSS. In the process, he has also created a Hindu constituency that until recently lay dormant or scattered and is now showing signs of cohesion and effervescence. He has rejected the idea that pluralism demands that a leader occasionally wear a Muslim skullcap in public and has paid little attention to such faux displays of brotherhood.</p>
<p>Like his bond with the poor—who invest their trust in him despite his ambitious yet disruptive measures such as demonetisation, which turned a vast chunk of currency illegal tender overnight— his appeal among Hindus in general appears to have grown, despite his running down weed-smoking <em>sadhus</em>, urging them to change with the times, study Hindu philosophy and break free of indolence. India’s have-nots may have borne the brunt of the inconvenience caused by notebandi, but as the economist Jagdish Bhagwati observed, the fact that there was no violence or unrest among people was a sign of people’s confidence in the Modi Government and its goals. He was right: contrary to the expectations of some, his emergent Hindu constituency and the poorest of the poor stood firmly behind him, as seen in his party’s emphatic victory in the polls held a few months later in Uttar Pradesh, where their troubles in the wake of demonetisation were not even an issue.</p>
<p>Modi’s image among aspirational lower-income groups as a man on a mission to change India and as a moderniser has helped him not only win votes, but also govern the country with the resolve of a leader aware of the strength of his backing. Also noteworthy, say observers, is his ability to detach himself from the excesses of power, which he combines with an inclination to question old attitudes and unsettle the bureaucracy.</p>
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<p>Modi sets targets for various schemes, and appraisals of ministers and officers are done not on their broad claims, but on specific performance metrics against deadlines. Those who perform well, especially among ministers, are rewarded</p>
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<p>The countrywide Hindu constituency that he has been working to create as a force has not fully taken shape yet, but evidence of it had surfaced as early as the state polls of 2013. His visits, not only to poll-bound states such as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan but also Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, had begun to evoke interest even among his ideological opponents. He had an impact on the BJP’s mentor, the RSS, too; it was as though Sangh workers had found a new purpose in life, galvanised by the arrival of a man they looked up to. This trend has caught on and opposition efforts to contain it have produced no results; on the other hand, they seem to have boomeranged. Take Karnataka, for instance, where the former Congress government of Siddaramaiah had favoured the according of ‘minority’ status to the state’s numerically strong Lingayats, a grouping of 99 largely OBC and Dalit castes, thereby officially placing them outside the Hindu religious fold.</p>
<p>Despite the Congress campaign, Lingayats voted largely for the BJP, laying to rest any doubt of their affiliation. Such indications of a robust Hindu nationalism gaining in currency across the country are abundant now, thanks to Modi’s espousal of it. In keeping with this, he has distanced himself from what he perceives as contrived definitions of propriety that have long held sway over the national capital. Being an outsider, he appears to relish reaching out to the poor and disadvantaged through myriad welfare schemes, part of his agenda of inclusive governance that he expects will deliver the best political outcomes.</p>
<p>Often, consummate politicians tend to be sloppy with governance, a charge that was levelled even against Barack Obama in the US. Having been a chief minister for 13 years, Modi has a record of revitalising governance to make room for an industrial boom. He achieved this in Gujarat; and even though a few business leaders had been critical of him in the aftermath of the 2002 violence there, he ran what analysts described as a business-friendly administration. It was also in his home-state that he learnt to get his message across to people via social media, bypassing the traditional vehicles of print and television that appeared ranged against him at the time. Hard work was the mantra. His team at the Chief Minister’s Office would diligently scour newspapers and collect information about the needy—be it a school without a roof or a village without a toilet—and then walk the last mile to solve the problem. Stories of such ‘direct interventions’ made an impression on people who could hardly believe that the high and mighty could take such an interest in their lives. The outreach helped Modi tighten his grip on Gujarat.</p>
<p>Things aren’t very different in the Prime Minister’s Office today. Reams have been written about Modi working closely with his trusted bureaucrats. Unlike in the recent past, the PMO is not just a recipient of ideas and PowerPoint presentations on policies are taken and work done by various ministries. According to those in the know, Modi sets targets for various schemes in consultation with top bureaucrats and others, and appraisals of ministers and IAS officers are done not on their broad claims, but on specific performance metrics against strict deadlines. Those who perform well, especially among ministers, are rewarded with more responsibility, while laggards are shown the exit.</p>
<p>It’s true that the PMO has been run with exemplary efficiency even in times past—think of the time that PN Haksar used to man the office—but even in those days, it was more or less an office of oversight. Under Modi now, it plays the role of a change agent within, and the transition he has effected appears to have rattled IAS officers used to handling things on their own pace. The PMO now keeps a tab on each major decision, even as channels of communication with the party are kept open so as to allow the Government and the party to work in tandem. The processes of governance and politics have been linked to operate in unison. This system of governing the country, ministers argue, is designed to bring gains both for the ruling party and the people at large.</p>
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<p>Rooted in Hindutva and grounded in governance, the Prime Minister is experimenting with stereotype-defying vision to expand the footprint of his politics. Such is his aura that most negative campaigns against him have fizzled out</p>
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<p>Rooted in Hindutva and grounded in governance, the Prime Minister is experimenting with a stereotype-defying vision to expand the footprint of his politics far and wide. While bureaucrats and ministers have been made accountable for their actions, any cynicism that the Government is different from its politics has been put to rest, and the apparent courage of Modi’s conviction in doing this seems to have endeared him to his supporters. Such is his aura that most negative campaigns against him—such as the charge that he polarises people by religious faith—have fizzled out over the past four years. This is at least partly because of the bold stance he has taken on his ideology, which he does not compromise through any pretence to upholding so-called secular principles. His authenticity has won him admirers.</p>
<p>Contrast Modi’s style with that of Congress leaders. Indira Gandhi too had deployed Hindu nationalism in the early 1980s to fight secessionist forces in Punjab (and win Hindu votes in the bargain), all of it under the cloak of secularism. A similar attempt was made in the late 1980s by her son Rajiv Gandhi, perhaps to compensate for being seen to appease minorities by enacting a law in response to a legal verdict on a Muslim woman’s right to alimony; he had tried to placate Hindu seers seeking the ‘liberation of Ramjanmabhoomi’ by opening for rituals a disputed site in Ayodhya—the one where the Babri Masjid stood—and then launching a campaign for the 1989 Lok Sabha from this town in an obvious effort to woo devotees of Lord Ram.</p>
<p>In more recent times, Rajiv’s son Rahul Gandhi has been visiting one temple after another. He did this in Gujarat last year and also in Karnataka, where he did the rounds of many Hindu <em>maths</em>. The current Congress strategy of shoring up its majority credentials, it seems, involves trying to attract Muslim voters without openly being seen as doing so; this, observers say, smacks of hypocrisy. The Congress’ other approach, of portraying Modi and his party as anti-Dalit, has not made headway either as poll outcomes show.</p>
<p>The main opposition party seems too steeped in old thinking to recover its electoral appeal. It reminds one of the scenario captured by the American journalist and author Mark Leibovich in his book, <em>This Town</em>, which lays bare the secret world of Washington’s power players who are so full of their privileges that they fail to notice what’s was going on.</p>
<p>What the opposition and its supporters need is to introspect, not celebrate the coming together of the Congress and JD-S in a joint bid for power in Bengaluru, nor make extravagant claims about how such an alliance could deal the BJP a blow in 2019. The hype over such arithmetic is built on fond hopes and obscures a major takeaway from the Karnataka polls: the BJP’s emergence as the single largest party marks the success of a larger narrative of cultural nationalism over Congress ploys like its divisive Lingayat decision. Siddaramaiah’s efforts to stoke Kannada linguistic chauvinism and his allegations of a ‘conspiracy’ by North Indians to impose Hindi on this state did not help him retain office. He also derided Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah as ‘North Indian’ imports. They addressed rallies in Hindi and triumphed nonetheless.</p>
<p>It is clear that what helped Modi and Shah prevail was the sentiment of Hindu nationalism which crossed the Vindhyas and undid the Congress formula of ‘Ahinda’, a social coalition of Backwards, Dalits and Muslims that has held the party in good stead in times past. Some commentators had expected them to fetch the party more than half the electorate’s votes in Karnataka. However Hindu resentment against the party’s religious tactics vis-à-vis Lingayats played a larger role. Those who did not fall into that trap include many <em>maths</em> and seers who have long championed the case of Lingayats being a separate religious community.</p>
<p>Today, the Congress is in power in places where only a fraction of Indian citizens reside, while the BJP and its allies preside over an electorate that accounts for more than 60 per cent of the country’s voting population.</p>
<p>Over the past four years, Modi and his team have been subjected to much scrutiny, even villainised, but this is not new to him. He was a victim of similar opprobrium when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat. His Government has been charged with plenty by its critics, from ‘intolerance’ and ‘bigotry’ to ‘minority baiting’ to ‘fascism at the gates’, but the Prime Minister does not allow himself to be distracted from the job he has been given by the country’s electorate through a free and fair General Election.</p>
<p>There is another one due within a year, and Modi remains unchallenged as a national leader. He has tenacious volunteers working for him in the field. In Karnataka, they took his message far and wide, and he is aware of the difference it makes. He is also aware that he is seen across the country as the man of the hour. Now more firmly in power than ever before, it’s clear that he intends to keep it that way from one victory to the next.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Unchallenged1.jpg?itok=68oSSbEM" /><div>BY: PR Ramesh</div><div>Node Id: 24339</div>Thu, 17 May 2018 20:33:02 +0000vijayopen24339 at http://www.openthemagazine.comA Vicarious Win for Modihttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/a-vicarious-win-for-modi
<p>ON COUNTING DAY, as the first leads were crystallising into victories, the saffron wave that swept through Karnataka seemed to cradle Umanath Kotian, an unresisting mouthpiece for Hindutva, in its arms. Contesting from Moodbidri in the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada, Kotian trounced four-time Congress MLA and former minister Abhayachandra Jain by nearly 30,000 votes to open the BJP account in the constituency. The BJP won seven of eight Assembly seats in Dakshina Kannada, and all five seats in the adjoining district of Udupi, reasserting its might in a region that first came under its wing in 1983 but went the Congress way in 2013. Kotian promptly dedicated his victory to the BJP leadership and to Prashant Poojari, the 29-year-old Bajrang Dal activist whose murder on October 9th, 2015, attributed to communal grudges, rocked the coast and remoulded the crust of Hindu society in Karnataka. The BJP’s tally of 104 in this year’s Assembly elections, with major gains in central, Malnad, coastal and Bombay-Karnataka districts, is as much a result of hortatory campaigning by booth-level workers and Sangh Parivar activists, as it is a testament to the cult of Narendra Modi, whose rallies quickened the pulse of the state in the final days before the polls.</p>
<p>On the morning of May 17th, as sullen Congress MLAs were getting ready to march to Vidhana Soudha from a resort on the southern fringes of Bangalore to protest Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala’s decision to invite the BJP to form the next government in Karnataka, BS Yeddyurappa took oath as Chief Minister with the confidence of someone who had outmanoeuvred his opponents. The previous evening, the post-poll Congress-JD(S) combine had been celebrating its shimmering, glass-thin edge of nine seats over the BJP, which had emerged as the single largest party for the third time in the state, with 104 seats in a house of 224, 222 of which had gone to the polls on May 12th. The JD(S), under HD Kumaraswamy, seemed to be the nucleus of this crafty new political order, and looked all set to usurp the democratic prerogative with just 37 MLAs. Rivals turned partners, the Congress and the JD(S) had even petitioned the Supreme Court late on Wednesday night in a bid to stop the BJP from forming the government. But the BJP, not content with a ‘moral win’, snatched the victory from right under their noses. With two weeks ahead of them to wrangle a majority, Yeddyurappa, the architect of ‘Operation Lotus’ in the wake of the 2008 elections when the BJP had fallen three short of the halfway mark, and the party’s backroom boys are busy trying to ensure a Congress- mukt Karnataka.</p>
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<p>On the morning of May 17th, BS Yeddyurappa took oath as Chief Minister with the confidence of someone who had outmanoeuvred his opponents</p>
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<p>At the Congress legislature party meeting on May 16th attended by most of its winning MLAs, the mood was far from happy. Outgoing Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, sources say, was on the verge of tears over the Congress’ inability to form a monolithic government despite polling a higher vote share (38 per cent as against the BJP’s 36.2), and even more so, for losing his Ahinda shirt along the way. The ultimate futility of playing on the insecurities of underprivileged communities seemed to dawn on the Congress hero as he heaved his last sigh. “He feels let down. All his welfare schemes, Anna Bhagya and Indira Canteens, have amounted to nothing in the end,” says B Nagendra, a mining baron who won on a Congress ticket from Ballari. Supporting a controversial proposal to lure the Lingayats with a separate minority religion had been a calculated risk, but the government’s welfare schemes and pro-poor image should have sufficed to attract OBC and SC/ST votes. And yet, despite no palpable anti-incumbency, 16 Cabinet ministers lost their seats in what can only be interpreted as a verdict against complacency.</p>
<p>“The Congress made many bad decisions under Siddaramaiah, and he shot himself in the foot by contesting in Chamundeshwari, where he has no base,” says GT Deve Gowda, the JD(S) challenger who cannot stop smiling after vanquishing the Kuruba leader by a margin of over 36,000 votes. “I was expecting to win with a 25,000-vote margin, but Siddaramaiah’s negative campaign against the JD(S) made it easier for me.” In the event of a Congress-JD(S) coalition, Gowda, who, ironically, ran a vigorous campaign for Siddaramaiah when the latter was a JD(S) leader, is likely to be conferred a ministerial berth. “All personal issues aside, the JD(S) is ready to work with a Siddaramaiah-led Congress. Despite all his shortcomings, he is the only mass leader for the party,” Gowda says. Old enmity, it is said, is stronger than new unity. Siddaramaiah and Kumaraswamy may appear to paper over their differences in order to edge out the BJP, but sources in the Congress say the outgoing chief minister will not take kindly to being sidelined, and that his supporters may incite a rebellion within the ranks.</p>
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<p>“The people believed in our message of protecting Hindus and working for disadvantaged castes. Many SC and ST communities have realised the Congress was favouring OBCs over them” - Sriramulu, BJP MLA from Molakalmuru</p>
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<p>THE CONGRESS, IN any case, was a divided house without a value proposition, says BJP leader B Sriramulu, the man of the moment in the north-central districts where the party has won big by consolidating Lingayat and Nayaka votes. “The people believed in our message of protecting Hindus and working for disadvantaged castes. Many SC and ST communities have realised the Congress was favouring OBCs over them. Siddaramaiah, by sidelining SC-ST leaders within the party, has dug his own grave,” says Sriramulu, over breakfast—<em>poori, aam ras</em> and Betageri chutney—at party leader Mahantesh Mamadapur’s residence in Badami, Bagalkot district. Glued to his iPhone for Election Commission updates, he declines a serving of potato <em>bhaji</em>—“I gave up onion and garlic 10 years ago. I used to drink a lot back then”—and appears unfazed although trailing by 500 votes in Badami against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah at last count. Concern begins to knit his thick brows as he makes his way to the Banashankari temple for a <em>puja</em>, accompanied by wife Bhagyalakshmi and a horde of supporters. He would win the Molakalmuru seat in Chitradurga by a comfortable margin, while losing Badami by just 1,696 votes—lower than the NOTA count of 2,007, and among the slimmest margins in this election. He has more cause for worry, however: his associates, the Reddy brothers of Ballari, managed to win just three of the nine seats in the district under their purview. “The Congress has been running a vicious campaign of maligning BJP leaders in Ballari as corrupt. We have suffered a setback. I am going to meet independents and other MLAs to try and make up for this loss,” Sriramulu tells me as he leaves the counting centre in Bagalkot. His tone of self-assurance when he arrived in the AM by chopper in a cloud of red dust has a more provisional feel to it now as early trends predicting a BJP majority have morphed into what promises to be a virulent battle for power.</p>
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<p>“Siddaramaiah feels let down. All his welfare schemes, Anna Bhagya and Indira Canteens, have amounted to nothing in the end” - B Nagendra, Congress MLA from Ballari</p>
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<p>There is enough reason, however, for the BJP to celebrate. In Bombay-Karnataka, a decisive region comprising 50 seats, the party reaped considerable gains, winning 30 and reducing the Congress from a tally of 31 in 2013 to 17. In Bagalkot district, under which Badami falls, the BJP lost just two out of seven seats. In the central Karnataka district of Chitradurga, where Sriramulu has been elected from Molakalmuru, the party bagged five out of six seats. Ironically, senior Dalit leader and incumbent minister for Social Welfare, H Anjaneya, lost by an embarrassingly large margin in Holalkere. Even more surprisingly, in neighbouring Davanagere, where the BJP had no presence, it won six out of eight seats.</p>
<p>The ground outside the Bagalkot counting centre is stained the colour of the blooming <em>gulmohars</em> that line the road from Badami to Bagalkot. Drunken revelry prevails among BJP supporters even as Congress workers conduct feeble fuschia-smudged celebrations in Badami, where, despite the JD(S) fielding a Lingayat to split the BJP’s vote, Siddaramaiah barely scraped through. We go looking for answers in Muttalageri, a Kuruba village 7km from town. “Kurubas and Muslims voted for Siddaramaiah, but despite ST leader Satish Jarkiholi managing the campaign, the tribal votes went to Sriramulu,” says Arif B Mullah, a 26-year- old electrician, agricultural worker and Siddaramaiah fan. “Somewhere down the line, the Congress came to be seen as a Kuruba-and-Muslim party.”</p>
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<p>“The Congress made many bad decisions under Siddaramaiah and he shot himself in the foot by contesting in Chamundeshwari, where he has no base” - GT Deve Gowda, JD(S) MLA</p>
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<p>Just seven Muslim candidates have emerged victorious—down from 11 in 2013—in the Assembly polls this year, all of them from the Congress. The JD(S), which fielded eight Muslims, is perplexed at its losses despite Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) offering its support to the party. “We expected Muslims to back us, but Siddaramaiah has emerged as a champion of Muslims,” says GT Deve Gowda. “We may have won close to 45 seats had we been able to attract Muslims. But in politics, everyone cannot drive the bus. For us, Vokkaligas are the force propelling us forward.”</p>
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<p>“Lingayats have made it clear that they won’t back a divisive chief minister. The BJP sailed through thanks to welfare works, the promise of development and Prime Minister Modi’s intense campaigning” - Aravind Bellad, BJP MLA from Hubli-Dharwad West</p>
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<p>Lingayat and Brahmin dominance and communal polarisation worked to favour the BJP in districts like Shimoga, where the BJP won six of seven seats for the first time, and Uttara Kannada, represented in Parliament by firebrand Union minister Anant Kumar Hegde, who had been instructed to lay low towards the fag end of campaigning in response to repeated allegations of hate speech against him. Much of the BJP’s success story this time has been ghost-written by the RSS, which had swung into action months ahead of electioneering. According to Vishweshwar Bhat, editor-in-chief of <em>Vishwavani Daily</em>, a Kannada newspaper, the BJP followed a clear strategy where the triptych of Modi, Amit Shah and Yeddyurappa dominated the campaign, with local leaders largely restricted to campaigning in their respective regions. “Senior leaders like Ananth Kumar and Ramesh Jigajinagi played backroom roles. Jagadish Shettar passed up an opportunity to establish himself as a mass Lingayat leader by campaigning only in Hubli-Dharwad. DV Sadananda Gowda’s campaign did not cross the boundaries of Bangalore Urban. The Modi-Shah-BSY juggernaut stole the show, but in many constituencies, such as Bhatkal in Uttara Kannada where the BJP candidate won despite the large number of Muslim votes in the constituency, the victories were made possible purely by grassroots work,” he says.</p>
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<p>“We stand corrected. All calculations went awry for the Congress. The BJP was seen as favouring the Bunts over the Billavas and the Mogaveeras, who we assumed would vote in favour of the Congress, but this did not happen” - BV Seetharam, editor of <em>Karavali Ale</em></p>
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<p>The Congress managed to retain most of its seats in Bengaluru, where polling was abysmally low in many constituencies, and in Hyderabad-Karnataka, where it won 21 out of 40 seats, as against 23 in 2013. What it did not expect was a rout in coastal Karnataka, with ministers Ramanath Rai and Pramod Madhwaraj suffering humiliating defeats in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts, respectively. “We, too, stand corrected,” says BV Seetharam, editor of Karavali Ale, a Mangalore newspaper. “All calculations went awry for the Congress. The BJP was seen as favouring the Bunts over the Billavas and the Mogaveeras, who we assumed would vote in favour of the Congress, but this did not happen. Had the Congress fielded fresh candidates instead of opportunistic incumbents like Vinay Kumar Sorake, Moiuddin Bawa and Pramod Madhwaraj, it may have fared better. Besides, the Congress government failed to address the simmering issue of communal killings.”</p>
<p>Lingayats largely voted in favour of the BJP, with the Congress’ nugatory efforts to divide and poach their votes only serving to further alienate Hindus. “Lingayats have made it clear that they won’t back a divisive chief minister,” says Aravind Bellad, the Hubli-Dharwad West MLA who improved upon his margin of 2013 margin of 11,182 votes by securing 40,487 more votes than his Congress rival. “The BJP, on the other hand, sailed through thanks to welfare works, the promise of development and Prime Minister Modi’s intense campaigning,” Bellad says. Notably, Minister for Geology and Mines Vinay Kulkarni, a Panchamsali Lingayat from Dharwad and a top leader of the Congress-backed Lingayat agitation, lost by a margin of over 20,000 votes.</p>
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<p>“The Modi-Shah-BSY juggernaut stole the show, but in many constituencies, such as Bhatkal in Uttara Kannada, where the BJP won despite the large number of Muslim votes in the constituency, the victories were made possible purely by grassroots work” - Vishweshwar Bhat, editor-in-chief of Vishwavani Daily</p>
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<p>What is even more telling is how the Ahinda vote fractured as marginalised communities vacillated towards the BJP. The lack of parity in reservations and political representation among the SCs of Karnataka, broadly classified into ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘touchable’ and others, led to a chunk of the ‘left’ votes leaving the Congress camp in strategic seats. Out of 34 seats reserved for SCs, the BJP won 16 and the Congress 12, with the JD(S) bagging the rest. In 2013, the BJP had managed to win just seven SC seats, with the Congress sweeping 17 of them. In the coming days, as TV reporters get busy tracking the venality of the resort politics in store, the Congress will want to keep its MLAs safe from the clutches of the BJP, but not without wishing that it had fortified its votebank against a saffron onslaught.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Vicariouswin1.jpg?itok=s8FICcak" /><div>BY: V Shoba</div><div>Node Id: 24338</div>Thu, 17 May 2018 20:03:18 +0000vijayopen24338 at http://www.openthemagazine.comEverything Has Changedhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/everything-has-changed
<p>THE DRAMA IS a distraction, a denial and a disappointment. It reduces Karnataka, where there is only one winner, as in any competition, to an autonomous, isolated piece of uncertainty, to a dispute that highlights the ungraciousness of the losers. Karnataka is bigger than the combined worth of all those damaged totems jostling for the microphone, and its message is louder than their nauseous ventriloquism. It is the newest sentence in a passage of India re-imagined. It just shows how we have come to take the history-shifting change in the largest—and most nonlinear—democracy for granted. It is as if we want to remain static and content with our received truisms even as India discards its oldest political superstitions. Everything has changed, and as Karnataka comes on the fourth anniversary of Narendra Modi in power, here is India, still incomprehensible to the dramatic personae, in five paragraphs.</p>
<p><strong>THE ONLY ONE</strong></p>
<p>There comes a moment in the evolutionary tale of nations when one man’s quest becomes a people’s destiny. Modi, in this era of strongmen and populists, is unarguably the strongest of them all with the biggest mandate of a democracy, something a Putin or an Erdogan cannot claim. After perhaps the longest campaign in contemporary politics, from the embers of Gujarat 2002 to the liberation of Delhi 2014, he has still not paused. Power, for some, is more than governance. It is a state of permanent war, waged in people’s minds. That is what redeems ‘change’ from the banalities of stump speeches. His words alone still form the arguments that win India, Karnataka being just another turn of phrase.</p>
<p><strong>THE INSIGNIFICANT OTHER</strong></p>
<p>Modi’s argument has already made the other party redundant. The Congress-free India that he promised during the campaign for 2014 is no longer a rhetorical wish. As you read in this space last week, ‘Karnataka could be the moment—the beginning of a new argument that breaches the last resistance of the Vindhyas.’ The idea of anti-Congressism has had its share of apostles, socialists being the ideological adventurists and opportunists—among them. Modi has made it singularly unambiguous, a prerequisite for national renewal.</p>
<p><strong>IT’S A CULTURAL SHIFT</strong></p>
<p>The nation has come back to concentrate the Indian mind, formerly secularised by the Nehruvian project of the New Indian. The project remained more or less intact in spite of irregular assertions of independence; the cultural establishment, built over decades of entitlement and entrenchment, was too strong to be challenged by weak, sporadic rejoinders. In the past, the challengers, accidental or elected, were too busy managing power rather than making use of it. For Modi, being in power is more than a political fulfilment. It is a mandate for retrieving the nation from a false argument in which religion was an apology rather than an identity. In Modi’s hands, the Gandhian spirituality of politics has become an aggressive assertion of the nationalist mind. Earlier, it sounded dismissive and dreadful whenever BJP was translated as the Hindu Nationalist Party. In Modi’s India, which is not culturally unipolar as liberals may lament, it is the natural party of governance. As natural as, say, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union. Why is it that only religious adjectives need vindication? India doesn’t have to struggle for an answer any longer. The cow jihadis and other armed culture warriors from the fanatic fringe may provide tailor-made examples of regressive Hindu nationalism to those who are in need of them, but the shift Modi has made in four years goes far beyond the vulgar and the spectacular.</p>
<p><strong>THE GLOBAL NATIONALIST</strong></p>
<p>There are two kinds of nationalists at play today: those who seek the global stage and others who retreat from it. Modi belongs to the first category, and in a short span of time, he has become the new wise man from the East, a title for so long held by the Chinese. He is the first true internationalist in power after Nehru, but he is not building on a legacy. He is not playing out the script of Third Worldism; he is not championing an ideological division of the world. At a time when rogues are still in power, the foreign policy of any global player should have a moral content. We still tend to confuse morality with ideology. Modi, as a hyperactive globalist, has added a new dimension to India’s engagement with the world: moral pragmatism. It is about humanising ideology through ideas. It’s about not being paranoid like the Chinese, or isolationist like Trump’s America. Anti-Americanism is no longer the official religion of South Block, but Modi’s conversation with the world is not influenced by moral lessons borrowed from elsewhere either. That is a big deal for a country that lost much of its formative years because of free lessons from the socialist bloc.</p>
<p><strong>THE LIBERAL IN DENIAL</strong></p>
<p>In his powerful little book, <em>The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics</em>, Mark Lilla, himself a disillusioned liberal, says that liberals ‘are losing because they have retreated into caves they have carved for themselves in the side of what once was a great mountain.’ They have become evangelists. ‘The difference is this: evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth.’ They are wilfully trapped in identity politics. ‘At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic dramas over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self.’ He writes in an American context, but his argument rings true in India, where the intellectual class that sustains anti-Moditva is weighed down by the enormity of ‘Me’—‘the rabbit hole of the self’. They can only hate him; they can’t escape him. They might as well dismiss the people, as Burke would have suggested—those ‘deplorables’, the people, unless they are easily ‘identifiable’ as groups and sub-groups. The liberal lives in an echo chamber.</p>
<p>IT’S NOT FOR the first time that India is in thrall to the Leader with a Capital L.Then it was power with a historical pedigree. It was the entitlement of a bloodline, though the original Mrs G was a natural while playing with the mass mind; it was as if she was born to play Mother India. The new Leader, whose legend has to be written in his own words, marks the revenge of the outsider, the man who came from the ordinariness of India, its possibilities in the politics of change. Modi is the change India is yet to comprehend fully.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Editor%27snote_6.jpg?itok=9AnWSLFW" /><div>BY: S Prasannarajan</div><div>Node Id: 24334</div>Thu, 17 May 2018 17:26:53 +0000vijayopen24334 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Poor Will Pave the Way for 2019http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/the-poor-will-pave-the-way-for-2019
<p>IN DELHI’S CORRIDORS of power, Government officials are busy filling up a 109-page questionnaire sent to each ministry to weigh delivery against promises made ahead of the General Election of 2014. With just a year to go for the next, the Modi Government has started taking stock of its achievements. The plan is to tell its story of inclusive development through numbers. Sample this: as per government data till March 23rd, 2018, of the over 35 million free LPG connections given under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, 29.9 per cent have been distributed to Dalits, a section that constitutes 16.2 per cent of the country’s population. Scheduled Tribes, who form 8.2 per cent of India, have got 14.3 per cent of the new connections. Non-SC/ST Hindus, accounting for over 60 per cent, have got 39.6 of the total. In Uttar Pradesh, where SCs make up 21.1 per cent of the state, they account for 40.5 per cent of the 6.5 million connections awarded. In Punjab, the state with the highest proportion of Dalits, at 28.9 per cent, they have got 68 per cent of these giveaways. In Karnataka, where SCs and STs together make up 22.8 per cent of all people, the two communities have been beneficiaries of 47.3 per cent of the connections given out. At the current pace of gas enrolment, say Central sources, 50 million new connections would have been given out by December 2018 across the country.</p>
<p>While critics and economists cite figures like the economy’s growth, investment rate and so on that make for a sobering scenario, the Government is counting on its flagship schemes to spell hope for the impoverished. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opponents may have dubbed some of these schemes ‘old wine in new bottles’, but he has turned the focus of attention on India’s have-nots, plugging leakages in welfare systems and pushing for last-mile delivery. Of the 60-odd Government schemes since independence, about one-fourth have been rolled out by the Modi Government. “After independence, one of the greatest challenges was identifying real beneficiaries, essentially weeding out undeserving candidates, and making the processes transparent,” says Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan. “The [Ujjwala scheme] is completely technology-based and one of the most transparently implemented schemes we have had in the country.”</p>
<p>This February, the Government enhanced the target for its gas scheme under which families below the poverty line are provided connections in the name of a woman of the household. The Ministry is monitoring its implementation and keeping track of beneficiaries.</p>
<p>“The best thing about gas is that it gives us time to think bigger,” says Sasmita Naik, gram pradhan of Odisha’s Haripur village and a mother of a four-month-old who got a connection under the scheme after her village was selected for a broader programme, the Gram Swaraj Abhiyaan. Till then, she had never expected to host a Union minister one day, but Pradhan himself was there for the inaugural ceremony.</p>
<p>ACCORDING TO PRADHAN, the scheme’s aim is to use LPG as a catalyst for social change: “It is not merely a new gas connection, but a tool to enhance the health and socio- economic indicators of women from less privileged sections of society.” The revised target, now at 80 million by 2020, will cover all SC/ST households, beneficiaries of the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), forest dwellers, Most Backward Classes (MBCs) and tea garden residents, besides poor households identified by the Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC). “Some of these NDA initiated welfare measures could have been undertaken earlier, but were not. While the drive to contain the misuse of LPG cylinders had begun under the UPA regime—that is, prior to this NDA Government— Mr Modi succeeded in adding urgency to it with the slogan, ‘Give it up’,” observes Professor Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Modi’s opponents may have dubbed some of the schemes 'old wine in new bottles', but the Prime Minister has turned the focus of attention on India's have-nots, plugging leakages in welfare systems and pushing for last-mile delivery</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Launched two years ago in Ballia, an economically backward district of eastern UP on the Bihar border, the Ujjwala scheme was seen as a significant factor in the BJP sweep of the state polls last year. The party, which holds 69 of the 85 reserved Assembly seats in UP, captured a large chunk of the BSP’s Dalit vote. While BSP chief Mayawati focused on Jatavs and Chamars, ati-Dalits moved towards the BJP. Similarly, among OBCs, who constitute around half the country’s population, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party concentrated on Yadavs in the state (which has over 70 OBC castes), but this left space for the BJP to reach out to its Most Backward Castes (MBCs). The party also has all of UP’s Lok Sabha seats reserved for SC candidates. For 2019, thus, the party needs similar if not greater SC and OBC support.</p>
<p>The Prime Minister has put himself in the forefront of the effort to deliver developmental benefits to the poor. At a personal level, he has been making it a point to underscore his ‘<em>chaiwaala</em>’ (tea seller) past, trying to touch a chord among the deprived by conveying that he empathises with them. BJP leaders say that Modi’s emphasis on a pro-poor agenda in his speeches, interviews and interactions are sufficient to convey his priorities to his Council of Ministers and others in the BJP, once dubbed a ‘Brahmin- Bania party’. Modi, they say, is committed to empowering the poor across caste and religious lines, as against handing out populist doles.</p>
<p>One of the schemes the BJP is expected to flaunt in the run-up to 2019 is village electrification, a promise made four years ago. As Modi tweeted last month, ‘28th April 2018 will be remembered as a historic day in the development journey of India. Yesterday, we fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever! I am delighted that every single village of India now has access to electricity.’ Under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, which incorporated the 2005 Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutkaran Yojana to give all households access to the power grid and free electricity to homes below the poverty line, the Modi Government had promised on Independence Day 2015 that it would have 18,458 villages linked to the grid by May 1st, 2018.</p>
<p>Jagdev, a resident of Sonbarsa village in UP’s Gonda district, recalls seeing electricity cables lying around since he was a child in the early 1980s while his village remained in darkness. Around three-four years ago, tired of waiting for electricity supply, he and some other villagers decided to pool funds for the private purchase of a ‘transformer’. “We managed to get electricity privately. Now, the government has got electricity poles and put up meters,” he says. “Nearby villages like Khairani, Mauja Chadauwa and Karnipur have got power six months ago.” Jagdev harbours the hope that it is only a matter of time before his home too gets power, officially.Only 10 per cent or more of all houses in a village need to have power for it to qualify as ‘electrified’; and by the latest Government data, 15 per cent of the country’s homes still have no power. “The electrification of villages is another big bang event, but the flip side of it is that it has drawn attention to homes that are still waiting to be lit,” says Professor Gupta. “The fact that now, after decades of waiting, all villages are finally wired up only draws attention to the actual darkness that still looms in many rural homes. As a result, the void in the last lane effort has become more palpable.” As he sees it, expectations have risen on this front, which increases the pressure on the Government to ensure that every rural dwelling has lights and usable plug points. “It has now become an ideological and programmatic pressure point in the political system which, once again, all parties will have to grapple with when they go out to seek village votes,” he says.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As Modi gives a push to infrastructure such as roads, railways, freight corridors, ports, airports, telecom network, infotech systems, toilets and more, he has attempted to provide an almost equal impetus to social sector schemes</p>
</blockquote>
<p>SOCIOLOGIST SHIV Visvanathan agrees that Modi has sharpened India’s focus on social sector schemes and that inclusiveness is important, but adds that new modes need new methods of evaluation. “It’s brand development,” he says, “You don’t name so many schemes after the Prime Minister. These are standard things a state does... Maybe it needs time. We have to move from rhetoric to proper evaluation.”</p>
<p>As Modi gives a push to infrastructure—roads, railways, freight corridors, ports, airports, telecom networks, infotech systems, toilets and more—he has attempted to provide an almost equal impetus to social sector schemes. The questionnaire given to various ministries includes a column on the progress made by them on ‘putting the country first in Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’, a BJP campaign slogan of inclusive development.</p>
<p>On transport, the Modi Government has picked up the threads of the Vajpayee regime’s Golden Quadrilateral highway project, with Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari now at the helm of an effort to make the country motorable from end to end. Over 27,000 km of National Highways have been constructed since 2014 and contracts for over 42,000 km have been awarded during this period, say Ministry sources. The 53,000-km Bharatmala Pariyojana (which includes 10,000 km build under earlier projects) is expected to be completed by 2021-22, but the spadework for it has begun. Even for this, say Ministry sources, special attention has been paid to fulfilling the connectivity needs of backward and tribal areas.</p>
<p>While Professor Gupta acknowledges that the Congress-led UPA Government had shown courage and administrative acumen in implementing MNREGA and Aadhaar, schemes that the NDA was happy to inherit, he says the Swachh Bharat Mission is a novel approach to addressing an old problem. “The huge increase in toilets built, regardless of the debate surrounding their efficacy, has generated significant political advantage to the BJP,” he says. “This is because the campaign against open defecation hardly ever figured as a political subject till the Prime Minister energised the Swachh Bharat campaign.”</p>
<p>Another major attention getter has been the Government’s medical insurance scheme, popularly called ModiCare. This is likely to feature prominently in the BJP’s self-appraisal ahead of 2019. “It aims to surpass the largely ineffectual Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana and has again stirred still waters. This time too, the Government has stoked expectations in an area that was largely quiescent, though it is undeniable that high medical costs constitute a serious national problem, especially in a poor country. This issue too is now upfront, even if the actual policy aspects of this health bill are unclear. But the debate on this subject has begun, and it can no longer be calmly sidestepped,” says Professor Gupta, who expresses the hope that out of this churn, a workable universal healthcare plan may emerge in the future which will connect all the dots from primary to tertiary medical care.</p>
<p>There are other schemes for the underprivileged as well, be it the Jan Dhan scheme, aimed at financial inclusion by offering no-frill bank accounts and other services, or the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, which aims to provide gainful employment to beneficiaries through skill training programmes.</p>
<p>With his campaign rhetoric and announcements, Modi has kindled aspirations and raised expectations across the country over the past four years. The pressure on the Centre now is to fulfill those promises. As Professor Gupta says, “Raising hope eventually raises all boats in the political waters, because now people want more. The NDA has undoubtedly helped swell this tide, but which way the wind will blow to fill the sails of these vessels is hard to predict.”</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Cooking.jpg?itok=TdoMi_EF" /><div>BY: Amita Shah</div><div>Node Id: 24328</div>Wed, 16 May 2018 19:48:18 +0000vijayopen24328 at http://www.openthemagazine.comCan the Hanuman Sticker Serve as a Prophecy for 2019?http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/can-the-hanuman-sticker-serve-as-a-prophecy-for-2019
<p>LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL ACTIVISTS who keep a hawk’s eye on the Narendra Modi Government have been distracted lately by a sticker of Lord Hanuman that began to appear on the rear window of cars across India. Designed by a Kerala-based artist, this image has been portrayed by some of these activists—many of whom seem to endorse violent stone pelting in Kashmir as an ‘uprising’ of the oppressed—as yet another attempt by rightwing forces to propagate militant Hindutva. On social media, they saw anger in Hanuman’s expression and harangued others on how it was strikingly distinct from the benign Hanuman they knew. They even cited lines of the Hanuman Chalisa to claim that they knew their religion better than those with such stickers on their vehicles.</p>
<p>Somewhere in a building called Rightwing Ecosystem, someone must be laughing out loud. A sticker has brought many to a level where they are arguing that a smiling Hanuman would be better than a Hanuman with an attitude. For many among this cabal, any display of Hindu identity is taken as a sign of regressive thinking, the kind that opposes ideas of liberty and modernity. Beef festivals held on university campuses in the name of Dalit empowerment or prostitutes named after a Hindu goddess are kosher for them, though; it is just resistance to ‘Hindu fascism’. On social media, many such activists consider it progressive to carry a swastika with legs running away from a man wielding a club, presumably a revolutionary ready to beat the symbol to a pulp. Upon being questioned, they say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, this is the Nazi swastika, a symbol of fascism.’ Over the past few years, this group has made it fashionable to shout slogans of Azaadi in the same tone and <em>lehja</em> as heard in Kashmir. They often smile and explain, ‘Oh, but we never ask for Azaadi from Bharat.’ In their smugness, they don’t realise that the people they like to club in a single homogenous block as ‘bigots’ are not dumb. People recognise these slogans and the sentiment behind them, having heard it on their TV sets for years.</p>
<p>As the Karnataka election results began to trickle in, many of these intellectual activists began to berate the South for going the North India way. They attributed the BJP’s emergence as the state’s single largest party to a rising bigotry among the Hindu majority. There was no attempt at introspection, no engagement with ‘bigots’ to understand why so many people have chosen to vote for the BJP, which we are told, time and again, is essentially a vote for Modi. There is not even a pretence to mull over the thought that maybe a few political analysts are right when they argue that voters rejected the Congress attempt to divide Hindus through its new-found love for Lingayatism, a game that seems to have boomeranged on the party. There has been little accommodation of a possibility that many may have no faith in Rahul Gandhi and hence consider the BJP a better—if not good— option versus the Congress.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A sticker has brought many to a level where they are arguing that a smiling Hanuman would be better than a Hanuman with an attitude</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was a redux of the same myopia one witnessed in 2017 after the BJP’s spectacular victory in Uttar Pradesh. In this state, intellectual activists had high hopes from an imagined Dalit-Muslim axis, in the process ignoring or just being ignorant of the ground reality. There was minimal thought spared on why the Hindu vote had got so heavily consolidated; why there had been such a sharp polarisation. Shehla Rashid wrote that she slipped into clinical depression for months after the poll results.</p>
<p>Some have called the BJP’s performance in Karnataka a victory for the cultural right. Many within the party like to credit Modi for bringing about this change. A senior BJP leader narrates a story about Modi’s visit to Varanasi after becoming Prime Minister in 2014. The leader who accompanied Modi says that while offering prayers at the Kashi Vishwanath temple, a priest anointed Modi’s forehead with holy sandalwood paste. As he prepared to leave, Modi, says the leader, tried to wipe off the mark before stepping outside. But the priest cautioned him, saying, <em>“Yatha Raja, tatha Praja</em> (As the king, so his subjects).” Modi is reported to have stopped right there, leaving the temple premises with the mark intact on his forehead.</p>
<p>Four years later, Modi was in Nepal with a <em>tilak </em>on his forehead, playing a musical instrument used for devotional <em>bhajans</em>. Ram and Sita were in the foreground on this visit. “Without Nepal, India’s faith is incomplete. Without Nepal, India’s history is incomplete. Without Nepal, India’s <em>dhams</em> (pilgrimage centres) are incomplete. Without Nepal, our Ram is incomplete,” Modi said.</p>
<p>It is easy to see how difficult it would be for anyone else to compete with such masterful evocation of Hindu symbols. Earlier, during Gujarat’s Assembly elections late last year, Congress President Rahul Gandhi was forced to avoid any mention of the 2002 riots and spent much time visiting temples, even as his partymen proclaimed him a Janeudhaari Brahmin with ‘Pandit’ as an honorific before his name.</p>
<p>ON THE FLIP side, however, this victory of the cultural right assumes silly proportions sometimes. When the Prime Minister refers to Ganesha’s trunk as evidence of the world’s first plastic surgery and harps on the wonders of yoga in international forums, one wonders whether a rightist cultural resurgence can be a leitmotif in India. The problem is accentuated each time militant Hindutva actually makes its menace felt, with some Muslims now hesitant to even carry cooked non-vegetarian food on trains or find that they’re barred from offering prayers in open spaces by hecklers shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’.</p>
<p>Recently, <em>Reuters</em> reported that the Modi Government had appointed a committee of scholars for the Sangh Parivar’s dream project of ‘Hinduising’ the history of India. This includes a mandate to prove that Hinduism was the belief system of India’s original inhabitants. According to the report, the committee has also been asked to ‘make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth’. It gels with the Sangh’s obsession with trying to find artefacts of the Mahabharata period, or tracing the path of the Saraswati river.</p>
<p>In the meantime, intellectual activists are busy isolating people who may not be in the Sangh’s fold but have concerns which they think are not being addressed. But instead of engaging with them to understand these issues, these activists find it easier to label them.</p>
<p>In a recent piece in <em>The New York Times</em>, Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, describes this rather well: ‘Liberals often don’t realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be. In exercising their power, they regularly not only persuade and attract but also annoy and repel.’ Alexander mentions a recent White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington where the comedian Michelle Wolf made some jokes that he says people responded less to because of her talent and more because they wanted to identify with a certain form of liberal politics. ‘For every viewer who loved her Trump bashing, there seemed to be at least one other put off by the one-sidedness of her routine,’ he wrote.</p>
<p>Gerard makes a prophecy for America: ‘A backlash against liberals—a backlash that most liberals don’t seem to realize they’re causing—is going to get President Trump re-elected.’ Considering how Indian liberal activists are behaving and reacting these days, it may not be too difficult to predict that some of them will fall into clinical depression in 2019.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Culture.jpg?itok=3Ihe9eiu" /><div>BY: Rahul Pandita</div><div>Node Id: 24327</div>Wed, 16 May 2018 19:38:37 +0000vijayopen24327 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Executive Unboundhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/4-years-of-modi/the-executive-unbound
<p>WHEN NARENDRA MODI became Prime Minister in 2014 after his party won over half of all Lok Sabha seats, a contradiction of sorts awaited him: If he had a powerful majority in the Lower House of Parliament, the apparatus of governance that he inherited—technically described as the executive—was hemmed in from various sides by other institutions like the judiciary and practices that had led to a rusting of its authority over time.</p>
<p>He was to run into this time and again. In March 2016, when his Government at the Centre recommended the dismissal of the Harish Rawat government in Uttarakhand, the decision was overturned by the High Court at Nainital. Large swathes of governance, ranging from environmental policy all the way to emergency measures (such as the imposition of Article 356 in case of breakdown of Constitutional machinery in states), that were once the preserve of the executive were now subject to judicial scrutiny, and in some cases, even supervision. There is little doubt that these changes were the result of institutional evolution over many decades, but the net result was that this left India’s executive a pale shadow of what it was when past prime ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi presided over it.</p>
<p>After four years in power, Modi presides over a government that has asserted the primacy of the executive in a manner that has not been seen in India for a long time. Much of this is sensationally described as a loss of judicial independence, or, more morbidly, as a threat to democracy. But when viewed against the canvas of Independent India’s history, Modi is only returning to what was the institutional norm.</p>
<p>In theory, the executive wing always has the primary role in formulating and implementing policy for the simple reason that it is the best equipped part of the state to react to ever-changing economic and political realities. In India’s case, these challenges are formidable. The country is located in one of the most challenging geopolitical environments in the world. Internally, managing a vast population across a diverse country requires quick action on almost a daily basis. In contrast, the judiciary is an institution that is designed to cast a backward gaze over actions that have already been taken by a government to see if they violate any law or are unfair. Instead, slowly over time, the judiciary had come close to engaging in ‘judicial creation of law’—a forward-looking task that belongs exclusively to Parliament and state legislatures. Over and above that, it also intervenes in policy matters that were once the sole domain of the Government. None of this is ‘illegal’, but it has led to a strange imbalance in the country’s institutional framework.</p>
<p>In the last 15 years, the whittling down of executive and legislative authority has taken an altogether pernicious hue. In 2004, the creation of the National Advisory Council (NAC) was perhaps unique in this respect. For the first time, the design of important laws—including those related to food security and an employment guarantee—was done outside Parliament. To be sure, they were debated in Parliament and these laws bear the stamp of its approval, but something vital was lost: in any parliamentary democracy, the Government moves legislation and Parliament discusses the proposal before it accepts or rejects it. That link was broken with the invention of the NAC. It would not be a stretch to say that these laws were hustled through Parliament. An even more dangerous idea was floated at that time, that of ‘pre-legislative’ scrutiny, something that would have reduced the role of Parliament even further.</p>
<p>At the same time, and in parallel, a different kind of politics came to dominate Delhi. Ambitious and highly educated persons who could not break through the barriers of party politics (or probably did not want to undergo the rough and tumble of it) found an alternate way of gaining political influence. This was in the interstices of the established institutions. As an influential lawyer, for example, one could engage in the work of securing ‘rights’ over and above those defined in the Constitution. On paper, these ‘new rights’ are merely elaborations of existing ones, but in practice these are de novo rights that were never debated in the Constituent Assembly (or in any session of Parliament since). The right to privacy is one such, something that at one point clashed with the Government’s plan to issue unique identification numbers to all—the Aadhaar plan.</p>
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<p>Modi presides over a government that has asserted the primacy of the executive in a manner that has not been seen for a long time. But when viewed against the canvas of independent India's history, he is only returning to what was the institutional norm</p>
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<p>It is a matter of chance that these issues came to a head when Modi was Prime Minister. But on another plane, the Government’s resolve to assert itself is something new. It is made of two parts: as a leader, Modi is firm and decisive in the ideas and policies he pursues; in addition, this resolve is backed by a strong majority in the Lok Sabha. The combination—one that has not been seen since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—is itself a complex product of the two parts. Well after he won a commanding majority in 2014, most commentators and analysts said Modi’s win was a fluke, a result of the corrupt and bumbling rule of the earlier UPA. The claim was that it was reactive in essence, and neither positive nor substantive as a mandate in its own right.</p>
<p>THE STRING OF victories in state Assembly elections from Maharashtra in October 2014 to Karnataka on May 15th puts all this in a different light. Modi’s strong leadership ensures electoral success, which in turn further empowers him in government in a way that is yet to be understood fully. What is clear is that in India, there is a strong link between executive authority and legislative strength: any weakness in the latter is detrimental to the former. This was abundantly clear during the coalition phase when the sharing of spoils among a council of ministers had a direct correlation with the weakness of a government or its inability to take decisions. The UPA’s infamous policy paralysis is an exemplar of this phenomenon.</p>
<p>In the eyes of a large number of intellectuals and analysts, Modi’s advantage of authority is an alleged danger to democracy, the theory being that when a powerful leader is in command, such a peril is almost automatic. Claims of this type have been analysed by Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University who calls them ‘tyrannophobia’. The idea of a ‘clash’ between the Government and the judiciary is based largely on this strong leader assumption. What has been ignored in all this is the internal working of the judiciary and how it may have arrived at an understanding of the limits to judicial intervention. Even a mere suggestion along those lines is taken as a defence of the incumbent Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra.</p>
<p>There is little doubt that both Modi and Misra are strong leaders in their own right, each with a fine understanding of the institutions they lead. But these issues also have an element that is beyond the personalities involved. From roughly 1950, when the case of <em>Kameshwar Singh vs Province of Bihar</em> was decided, to a slew of judgments in the 1970s, the judiciary discovered its innate power in being the final interpreter of the Constitution. This span of roughly 25 years was a time of powerful prime ministers. The year 1975 marks a tipping point when the judiciary gained an upper hand, which it has since maintained through a process of innovation. This phase seems to be coming to a close.</p>
<p>It is not as if judges have gone ‘weak’ and the Prime Minister is overbearing, but something else is at work. Increasingly, among enlightened lawyers as well as judges, there is a recognition that the courts do not have the answers to all problems. The trouble is that while India’s Supreme Court has fashioned a new doctrine to safeguard the Constitution from wanton amendments by Parliament, it has no countervailing theory that could limit or even reverse its own intervention. The US Supreme Court, or at least an influential section of it, has in ‘Originalism’ a doctrine that places a strict limit on judicial interpretation. It is in the absence of such theoretical formulations in India that the role of judges who understand these issues comes to the forefront. Justice Misra is one such judge and that perhaps is a reason why he has been subjected to such controversy. It comes at a juncture in India’s history where a strong Prime Minister and a wise judge are able to comprehend what needs to be done. That, more than anything else, is why contingency is such a strong element in contemporary India.</p>
<p>Will this phase of executive ascendency last or will it wilt away in India’s chaotic politics? Here, history is no guide. The last time the balance tipped against the executive, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in control and the political environment— in spite of the severe turbulence seen in 1970s—was relatively benign. The switch from executive primacy to judicial imprimatur was slow and not so perceptible. This is not the case now. After a quarter century of coalition governments, it seems quite normal to have weak governments. In the realm of ideas, governmental weakness is conflated with democracy. The contemporary ferment is due to an unwillingness to accept that a proper government—in command of its own sphere—is not a danger to democracy. This threat is largely imagined. In an electoral democracy as competitive as India’s, the best way to tame the executive is by responding to political transgressions and not by ‘remedies’ suggested by theories of legal liberalism. Any strong leader in a robust democracy is subject to political pressures and sensitive to shifts in mood. As a strong communicator and an alert leader, Modi certainly falls in this class.</p>
<p>If perceptions are one matter, the political reality may be another. Much of the uncertainty is over the General Election due in 2019. If the BJP is unable to secure the phalanx it needs in the Lok Sabha, then a return to the era of divided governments cannot be ruled out. But there are other factors at work, too. For one, Modi has been able to build a large tent-like coalition; for another, the middle class—its numerical inferiority notwithstanding—is not politically as impotent as it was in the age of ‘Garibi Hatao’. But some matters are constant: historically, executive power is directly correlated with legislative strength, and that remains as true today as it was in the 1950s.</p>
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<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Executive1.jpg?itok=Il-zkXhD" /><div>BY: Siddharth Singh</div><div>Node Id: 24320</div>Wed, 16 May 2018 17:45:20 +0000vijayopen24320 at http://www.openthemagazine.com